The New Politics of Race in Brazil Bernd Reiter and Gladys L

EXCERPTED FROM Brazil’s New Racial Politics edited by Bernd Reiter and Gladys L. Mitchell Copyright © 2010 ISBN: 978-1-58826-666-8 hc 1800 30th Street, Ste. 314 Boulder, CO 80301 USA telephone 303.444.6684 fax 303.444.0824 This excerpt was downloaded from the Lynne Rienner Publishers website www.rienner.com 00Reiter_FMrev.qxd 9/8/09 3:51 PM Page v Contents Foreword, Michael Mitchell vii 1 The New Politics of Race in Brazil Bernd Reiter and Gladys L. Mitchell 1 Part 1 Black Empowerment and White Privilege 2 Whiteness as Capital: Constructing Inclusion and Defending Privilege Bernd Reiter 19 3 Politicizing Blackness: Afro-Brazilian Color Identification and Candidate Preference Gladys L. Mitchell 35 4 Out of Place: The Experience of the Black Middle Class Angela Figueiredo 51 5 The Political Shock of the Year: The Press and the Election of a Black Mayor in São Paulo Cloves Luiz Pereira Oliveira 65 Part 2 Affirmative Action Contested 6 Affirmative Action and Identity Seth Racusen 89 v 00Reiter_FMrev.qxd 9/8/09 3:51 PM Page vi vi Contents 7 Opportunities and Challenges for the Afro-Brazilian Movement Mónica Treviño González 123 Part 3 The New Politics of Black Power 8 Racialized History and Urban Politics: Black Women’s Wisdom in Grassroots Struggles Keisha-Khan Y. Perry 141 9 Black NGOs and “Conscious” Rap: New Agents of the Antiracism Struggle in Brazil Sales Augusto dos Santos 165 10 Power and Black Organizing in Brazil Fernando Conceição 179 11 New Social Activism: University Entry Courses for Black and Poor Students Renato Emerson dos Santos 197 Part 4 Conclusion 12 After the Racial Democracy Bernd Reiter and Gladys L. Mitchell 217 List of Acronyms 227 Bibliography 231 The Contributors 245 Index 247 About the Book 251 Reiter_1.qxd 8/27/09 10:49 AM Page 1 1 The New Politics of Race in Brazil Bernd Reiter and Gladys L. Mitchell Brazilian racism is not new, but this book, as the title indicates, ex- amines new aspects of the racial politics of Brazil and presents a fresh perspec- tive. The purpose of the book is to provide an overview of the emergent scholarship on black mobilization and agency in response to racism and color prejudice. It is also an attempt to capture the questions and problems triggered by a change in Brazilian “common sense,”1 in particular a new sensitivity and awareness of the ways that racism structures Brazilian lives. The focus on black agency is one of the main characteristics of a new generation of Brazil- ian and Brazilianist scholarship, a scholarship more in tune with subaltern per- spectives and thus able to offer new insights into Brazilian societal dynamics and their far-reaching political implications, especially with regard to a redef- inition of Brazilian nationalism. Unveiling Racism in Brazil Racism in Brazil has been exposed systematically as early as the 1950s, when a group of distinguished scholars undertook an analysis of what then was in- ternationally perceived as a “racial paradise.” The UNESCO-sponsored re- search project, headed by Charles Wagley of Columbia University, counted on such valuable contributors as Marvin Harris, Luis A. Costa Pinto, Thales de Azevedo, Ben Zimmerman, and Harry Hutchinson, thus combining the insights of outstanding anthropologists and sociologists. Initiated in 1950, this broad re- search project gradually expanded to include even more scholars, such as Roger Bastide, Florestan Fernandes, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and Octavio Ianni. By the 1960s, it was not only clear that Brazil was indeed far from being a racial paradise; it also became apparent that the whole idea of the racial paradise was a government-led nationalist project. 1 Reiter_1.qxd 8/27/09 10:49 AM Page 2 2 Brazil’s New Racial Politics Yet despite the growing awareness that inequalities in Brazil could not be explained by class alone, the scholarship of the 1950s and 1960s was not co- herent enough to dismantle the persuasive ideological construct of the Brazil- ian version of Jose Vasconcelos’s “cosmic race,”2 which reached back to the 1930s, and had, since then, been forcefully anchored into the Brazilian every- day reality by a series of vehement measures, including the use of a propaganda ministry under the Getúlio Vargas regime,3 and through it, the widespread pro- duction of “historically correct” textbooks to be used in the growing number of Brazilian public primary schools (Dávila 2003). By the early 1960s, when the counterhegemonic discourse of some of the authors associated with the UNESCO project could have impacted the broader society and the government, the military ended democracy in Brazil and suffocated any attempt at produc- ing the kind of knowledge that could have been used to mobilize parts of society for more justice and participation in politics as the military regime ended most voting. The scholars involved in critical studies of Brazilian society had to flee the country, and any attempt to continue researching Brazilian race re- lations came to an abrupt end. In 1985, when the military regime finally collapsed, Brazilian social sciences had to start from where they were cut off twenty years earlier. Nevertheless, critical race studies came back with a vengeance, now equipped with the newly de- veloped tools of more sophisticated statistical analyses that could count on a variety of new data, as the Brazilian state started to reintroduce skin color cate- gories into its censuses and surveys. In 1967, the Brazilian Institute for Geogra- phy and Statistics (IBGE) created the Pesquisa por Amostra de Domicílios (PNAD) or Penade, as it came to be known among Brazilian researchers. The PNAD is a household-based survey tool that produced a myriad of new data on Brazil’s social and economic reality. As a result, the ideology of the racial paradise came under increased attack, especially from a group of social scientists associated with the Rio de Janeiro–based Candido Mendes University, namely Carlos Hasenbalg, Nelson do Vale Silva, and Peggy Lovell, but also from a new crop of researchers at other universities, including the following operating out of the Federal University of Bahia: Nadya Castro, Antônio Sérgio Guimarães, Michel Agier, Luiza Bairros, and Vanda Sá Barreto, to name a few. These new voices added significantly to those that had spoken up against racism all along, particularly Cloves Moura, Lelia Gonzales, and Abdias do Nascimento. Race-Conscious Scholarship, Statistical Data, and Black Mobilization The analyses produced by this new generation of scholars left no doubt that ethnic background was an important variable in the explanation of Brazil’s Reiter_1.qxd 8/27/09 10:49 AM Page 3 The New Politics of Race in Brazil 3 extreme inequalities in such central spheres of life as education, the labor mar- ket, job mobility inside firms, marriage, and even life expectancy. These scholars proved without a doubt that Brazilian blacks were worse off than their white countrymen and women. Furthermore, this inequality could not be explained by educational backgrounds or unequal income and wealth alone. Brazilian whites (and Asians) fared much better than Brazilian blacks and browns with similar educational backgrounds, who suffered from discrimina- tion even if they had access to middle-class incomes. Money did not whiten after all, contrary to what Azevedo argued in 1954 (Azevedo 1996); nor was there a mulatto escape hatch benefiting brown people over black people as Degler (1971) had argued. This new knowledge was crucial for Brazil’s newly emerg- ing black-power movements, because it gave them the tools and arguments they needed to mobilize. After several attempts at mobilizing the Brazilian black population during the 1930s and the 1950s, they were silenced by the different manifestations of the Brazilian authoritarian state. Similar to the critical scholarship, black power in Brazil emerged invigorated from its internal and exter- nal exile. In 1978, when the military regime started to crumble, the Unified Black Movement (MNU) was created, thus providing a national framework for black activism for the first time. The data provided and analyzed by the new scholars from Rio de Janeiro and Salvador proved extremely instrumen- tal for the goals pursued by the MNU and similar organizations. This link de- serves further explanation, and allows us to explain the different uses of race in the literature, as well as in this book. Race is an elusive category and provides an even more elusive way to forge a sense of collective belonging. Nobody is more aware of this elusive- ness than Brazilian black-power activists. For most of the history of blacks in Brazil, Africans and their descendents had a strong sense of being different from their white slaveholders. This difference was forced onto them and used to hold them at the bottom of Brazil’s social hierarchies, and it left no doubt that Brazilian whites had no intention whatsoever to accept the moral and legal equality of blacks, which held true well into the twentieth century. The sense of black identity was indeed so strong during most of the colonial period and slavery, which lasted until 1888, that African and Brazilian blacks of different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds and of different degrees of biological mix- ture repeatedly united to contest white supremacy and attempted to overthrow the system that held them at the bottom. On several occasions, Brazil barely es- caped its “Haitian moment.” As late as 1931, the radical Frente Negra Brasileira, the Brazilian Black Front, had a membership of about 200,000, mostly concen- trated in the industrialized south (Davis 1999: 187). In 1936, however, the authoritarian government of Vargas outlawed the Black Front, together with all other oppositional political parties.

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